Mt. Kenya leaders issue ultimatum to BBI team

A section of leaders drawn from the Mt. Kenya region have given their expectations and demands ahead of the official handing in of the Building Bridges Initiative report to President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Led by their representative, Nominated Senator Isaac Mwaura, the MPs who held a joint press statement on Thursday demanded equal leadership representation, distribution of natural resources as well as equal formation of the government.

According to the leaders, the Mt. Kenya region had for a long time been overlooked in terms of resource allocations as well as voter representation which Mwaura claimed was still poor.

“We, as leaders representing Mt. Kenya region want to state categorically that our people are not well represented in parliament, counties and also in terms of equal distribution of resources. We demand that the BBI looks into this,” he remarked.

The leaders also demanded good policies to be put in place in order to enable Mt. Kenya residents to do their businesses in a peaceful environment without being disturbed by the government.

According to Mwaura, the maximum number of a population in each constituency is supposed to be 104,000 people but in some of the Mt. Kenya constituencies, the population had already surpassed the required number hence the need to create more constituencies.

“Those counties without big population usually get over 10billion but when it comes to highly populated counties like Murang’a, it only gets 6billion. This should be corrected!” maintained Mwaura.

The leaders expressed hopes that all the recommendations including those from church leaders have been included in the report.

They promised to stand firm to ensure that the region’s interests have been captured in the BBI report.

Once the report is out, the leaders promised to go for a retreat, read and interpret the report, then make informed decisions which they said will majorly inform part of the region’s decision on the BBI.

On Wednesday the joint Secretaries officially communicated to the office of the President that the Building Bridges Initiative taskforce had already completed filing its report and was ready to hand it over to President Uhuru Kenyatta and ODM leader Raila Odinga.